In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've mentioned here that for part of my adolescence, I lived with my family in Bethesda, which is one of the wealthiest places in the US, with a median household income in recent years about $190,000. In comparison, the median household income for Beverly Hills is about $127,000; the median household income for Greenwich, CT is about $136,000. The news photos of yesterday morning's FBI raid on John Bolton's home in Bethesda really took me back: that could have been my street and my neighborhood. I went to Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, whose team is the Barons. (This wasn't the monogram when I went there; at that time, it was more like the mustachioed Monopoly man, but the point is the same.) Bethesda has its own entry in the Urban Dictionary : Person from Bethesda: Hi, I'm from Bethesda. Person Not from Bethesda: Hi, you must be a rich snobby [redacted]. PFB: Well yeah kind of, but at least I'm not from Potomac where it's illegal t...

With Wednesday's news of President Trump calling on Federal Reserve Bank Governor Lisa Cook to resign following a criminal referral to the Justice Department for mortgage fraud, there are now three high-level figures accused of the same crime, declaring two separate homes their primary residence to get favorable interest, tax, and insurance rates. On Fox News, Kennedy interviewed legal commentator Horace Cooper specifically on Sen Schiff's predicament, but his comments in the clip embedded above apply just as much to the other two: This type of fraud is fairly common, and it is frequently prosecuted. In fact, the real challenge here is how will the senator find an easy way out. 18 US 1001 says that you can't lie, in writing or in your application, and 1014 says that you can't lie on your application. Once you've actually done that, and there's a five-year statute of limitations, unless that is extended by ongoing carrying-out activities to promote the...

Bishop Robert Barron posted yesterday on something I've noticed for a while on YouTube: phony videos that represent themselves as being on a particular topic, putatively generated by AI. I spent a career in tech, mostly before the "AI" quasi-phenomenon, but I've always been skeptical of what's now being represented as AI. Certainly it's the case that there are YouTube videos that represent themselves as being about Bp Barron, C S Lewis, and Abp Fulton Sheen, which quickly turn out to be vapid fakes -- but are they in fact AI-generated? In the video above, Bp Barron notes, One that just came out recently had me giving recommendations about how to remove demons from your toilet. So my point, everybody, is this is all ridiculous. And I think if you spend just a moment, you can tell the difference between an authentic video from me and one of these fakes. This is exactly right. What I see in the news over and over is that "they" are gonn...

It turns out that James Comey's strange video on Taylor Swift is just the tip of an iceberg. Julie Kelly has looked at all his Substack posts . These began in May. Clad in business attire and wearing some sort of white make up to conceal a persistent puffy-eye problem, Comey gives scripted performances in a cloying uptalk cadence to answer his critics in a carefree way to sound like he isn’t worried about potential legal consequences for what he did. He talks a lot about “love” and “laughter” and finding “peace” in the second era of Trump—quickly leading the viewer to believe Comey actually has very little love, laughter, or peace in his life. (A well-earned miserable existence if that’s indeed the case.) One big question is how he has the time to do this stuff -- making videos is actually time-consuming work. Keep in mind that he started as an associate at a white-shoe law firm and went on to climb the ranks as an associate US Attorney, a US Attorney, Deputy Attorney G...

🚨 BREAKING: Pam Bondi and Kash Patel have just appointed Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as CO-DEPUTY DIRECTOR of the FBI, alongside Dan Bongino, per Fox. pic.twitter.com/XkIdqM8hf5 — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 18, 2025 A couple of intriguing stories come from the FBI this morning. First is the move of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to become something called a "Co-Deputy Director" of the FBI, alongside the up-to-now not-Co-Deputy Director Dan Bongino. The replies to the X post are predictable; this is either a sign that Bongino is on his way out or a sign that Bondi and Patel need someone with prosecutorial experience who can lead a complex investigation. There is no reason both can't be true. My view all along has been that Bongino bought his ticket back home when he walked off the job last month over Pam Bondi's handling of the "Epstein files". Since then, William Barr has echoed Ghislaine Maxwell in saying there's...

So the weekend's big news is that James Comey has outed hinself as a Swiftie , which is to say a fan of Taylor Swift. I just haven't been following this phenomenon, and I did some quick research to bring myself up to date. Accoreding to Wikipedia , Taylor Alison Swift (born December 13, 1989) is an American singer-songwriter. Her autobiographical songwriting and artistic reinventions have made her a cultural icon of the 21st century. She is the highest-grossing live music artist, the wealthiest female musician, and one of the best-selling music artists of all time. I watched a couple of her routines on YouTube, and on one hand, they seem like something recycled from the last century, maybe Joni Mitchell meets Madonna, but on the other, although she's 35, an age when the musical greats of my generation were already dead, her persona is more like an angry, disillusioned 14-year-old. This incongruity seems to be the key to why James Comey is a Swiftie, he's from an...

Looking back, the few times I was actually paid directly to do writing, it was government statistical reports and corporate policy manuals. But I got out of those jobs and into more interesting technical work as soon as I could. I saw a piece by John Kass at Real Clear Politic s this morning that showed me why I'm grateful to the Almighty for steering me away from his kind of work. Kass had a 41-year career as a writer for the Chicago Tribune and now freelances. I'd be ashamed to be him. In today's piece: It was Obama who orchestrated the FBI and CIA to create what is now understood as the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and used it in attempts to destroy his political rival President Donald Trump. He set them like attack dogs on the American presidency, to rip it apart after the American people had elected Trump as their president. This may be true, but we're a long, long way from seeing it proven, and to write this sort of stuff now is pure wishful thinking. But he...